November Meetup

Big data made easy with Spark - Yousry Mohamed

If you’ve ever seen the word count program in Hadoop MapReduce, you can imagine why big data applications seems unnecessarily complex.
Enter Spark. Spark can be thought of as the agile solution to the waterfall MapReduce model for many types of applications.
You write code in functional language (i.e. Scala), work mainly using REPLs and get results almost instantaneously.
A mixture of a high level API to manipulate data (think distributed LINQ) plus libraries for ML, Graph Processing and streaming makes Spark best fit computation engine for big data applications.
In this session, I will give a high level introduction to Spark and show a bunch of practical applications of Spark in action.

Xamarin & Azure: BFF, Really? - Benjamin Tam

User expectations of modern apps are more mature and demanding than ever. Simply having a slick UI is no longer enough - whether the app is for the enterprise or the consumer, back-end connectivity will be required to allow your users to interact with the outside world.

So, this session will explore the integration story between Xamarin and Azure. It will examine some of the recent features that Azure provides mobile developers to deliver faster, allowing them to focus on the app and business value and not just the plumbing and dirty work.